Fix
by DaphneRunning
Summary: Ness isn't the only one who gets homesick. When Jeff does, it isn't his mother he wants to call. Mild, pre-puberty Jeff/Tony if you clap your hands and believe.


Title: Privilege

Summary: Ness isn't the only one who misses home.

"I'm sorry, okay?"

Jeff hunched over his work table, trying to ignore the sound of another brewing argument.

Tension was obvious in Paula's tight-lipped expression. "I'm just trying to understand. That skelpion was frozen, totally unable to move, and you had an opening. What were you thinking about? Jeff could have died!"

He had died, a little. That's what it had felt like when he'd woken up in the Scaraba hospital, the anxious nurses hovering over him, injecting him with antivenom. Usually he'd have said it was fine, at least Ness had paid for the hospital bill. Not like he had a choice. Not like Dr. Andonuts had ever given him an allowance. Jeff had hacked into Snow Wood's records, once. His tuition came from his father's account, but had been authorized ten years earlier by something called the Financial Managerbot 2100, patent pending.

Ness flushed dark red. "I was thinking about...well, it's just been a while since I called my mom. I got kind of hungry for the steak she used to make."

It took a supreme effort of will for Jeff to concentrate on his work, to focus his eyes through his thick lenses without rolling them. There was a little smudge on the bottom left of his right lens; somehow, that made him unaccountably sad.

"I just wanted to hear her voice, you know? She just...she has this way of making everything seem like it's going to be okay."

Paula wouldn't be angry with him, not any more. Jeff didn't have to look up from his circuit board and broken bits of tubing to figure that out. She'd only yelled in the first place because she was worried, because she so often had to play everyone's mother.

She needn't worry about trying to replicate the experience with Jeff. He wouldn't know a mother if she jumped up and bit him-but from what he'd read, that would have been unusual, for a mother.

"You should call her."

The boys at Snow Wood would have blustered, claimed that they didn't need to call home, that they were more mature, more detached than that. Jeff cut two inches of wire, inserted one end into the conductor.

"You're probably right. I'll go find a phone. I think there's one in the hotel."

"I'll come with you. That is-Jeff, are you going to be all right?"

Jeff nodded. He couldn't miss what he'd never had, after all.

He'd thought that would have been the end of the conversation, but Paula's soft hand came to rest on top of his. He looked up at her, startled, having already assumed she would have left the room. _Too much like Dr. Andonuts sometimes, Jeff. _

"You haven't been saying much." Paula's eyes were kind, and something about her expression made Jeff's throat tighten. "Are you that angry with him?"

It took Jeff a moment to work out what she was saying. He knew how machines worked, even when they didn't. It was people that he had problems understanding. "Who, Ness?"

"For not healing you."

Jeff shook his head. "I wasn't in proper form either. Everyone's mind wanders from time to time, right?"

Her smile wavered, then steadied. "You're a good friend, Jeff. We'll be back soon." She bent down and kissed his cheek, then hurried from the room after Ness and his cricket bat.

Jeff supposed he should call it a baseball bat, never mind that cricket had come first. Eaglelanders were surprisingly dense about things like that. _And why should I care? I've always hated cricket anyway._

Jeff took off his glasses, rubbed at his eyes. It was so hard to concentrate on fixing things while the world was awake, while light shone from every angle to bounce off his glasses, not just the tiny light he'd manufactured for his workstation. He rubbed at the lenses, but the smudge remained. Of course, his good cleansing solution was back on his nightstand in Snow Wood, on the table between his bed and Tony's. He rubbed at his eyes again, damning the desert sun that made them water so much.

As a mental exercise, certainly not for any other reason, Jeff found himself wondering whether he could trace the calls made to Ness's receiver phone, wondered if he could jury-rig the contraption to send as well as receive. It was in his hands before the thought had finished, being pulled apart by Jeff's deft, calloused fingertips.

Paula said nothing when she and Ness returned to find the receiver phone had turned into so many parts, strewn across Jeff's otherwise-untouched bed. Ness made a strangled sound in his throat, and there was a noise like a dark-pink shoe coming down hard on a trainer (_sneaker_, Jeff reminded himself; he wasn't in Foggyland anymore). "It'll be fine," he said absently, telling himself sternly that human contact was necessary, even when in the throes of academic exploration. "It's an experiment. It'll be all better in the morning."

"Oh, good," Ness said weakly.

Jeff didn't know why he cared so much. All Ness ever used the thing for was to get the occasional useless call from his father, telling him to rest a while, or when that overblown "genius" Apple Kid invented something else that Jeff would just have to fix later.

The good work didn't start until night fell. Maybe Paula's light snores reminded him of Tony's soft exhalations as Jeff pulled yet another all-nighter in their dormitory. Either way, his ideas came out with the stars. As he'd known they would, separate parts combined to form a more perfect whole.

Getting the phone working was the hard part. It was jury-rigged only, one-use unless he could turn up another coil of wire. Somehow, while Ness managed to turn his pockets inside out for Paula's teddy bears and his own hamburgers, they never seemed to go to any of the stores Jeff would have found really interesting. Except that shady arms dealer. Jeff had to give him that one.

The easy part was getting the phone number. That was child's play, especially if the child in question had the last name of "Andonuts." The phone rang twice, then a few more times, and several more after that, until Jeff began to seriously consider that he'd somehow flubbed the number. It was possible, he supposed. He'd often heard that everyone made mistakes.

"Hello?"

The lump in Jeff's throat disappeared. "Tony?"

He could almost feel Tony's sleepy mood evaporate, the palpable electricity of his excitement racing through the unconnected phones. "Jeff? Jeff, is that you? Oh, happy day!"

There was no one awake to hear. Nonetheless, Jeff stole out of the hotel room, shutting the door with a soft _snick_. "Hello, Tony."

"Is everything all right? Are you eating proper meals? Not a lot of that Eaglelander nonsense, but real food? Are you getting enough rest?"

Jeff's cheeks grew warm, and he touched them with cool fingers. "I'm doing fine. You know I never sleep much in any case, and there's been a surprisingly plentiful supply of boiled eggs and coffee. How's Snow Wood?"

"Snow Wood?" Tony sounded baffled, as if he couldn't fathom the fact that anyone who wasn't at Snow Wood could possibly care. "Oh, brilliant, as usual. I've covered for you, just as I said I would, but no one seems too worried. Professor Carlston says that if you miss much more class, he'll have caught up with you."

A small smile tugged at the corner of Jeff's lips. "He wishes."

Jeff could hear a faint clicking sound, covered wire on covered wire, and could see Tony as clearly in his mind as if he were standing right there. He'd be in his pajama shorts and shirt, leaning against the hallway wall, wrapping the telephone's connective wire around a finger. "Jeff, oh, I do hope you're being careful. I worry, you know. That Ness fellow doesn't say much, does he? Do you talk much around them? I know how you can be with new people. Must be a bloody silent group, between the lot of you. Speaking of which, Maxwell came by last night with the most brilliant thing-well, you know Maxwell, it doesn't _work_ per se, but I think it might be some sort of a trick, just to see if I'd pick up on it, and of course I haven't yet because I'm not you, I don't have that knack you have with machines, but it did _look_ interesting..."

Jeff leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes. He said little else, let Tony prattle on about classes, about Maxwell, about the difficulties of sending Jeff a letter when he kept moving around all the time, content to simply listen. If he hadn't been a good listener before moving in with Tony (and he couldn't remember a thing before that in any case), it was a skill he'd carefully honed in the last decade. _I never thought I'd miss his chatter. _

"...finally got hold of someone who says he's seen you, and are they _really_ letting you carry bottle rockets around? Do your new friends know what happened last time? Speaking of which, Professor Barryman has a new cat, and..."

One of Jeff's first memories was of a machine breaking down. He couldn't remember what it had done, or what had broken it in the first place, but he remembered the whirrs and clicks of metal against metal, the only lullaby he could recall from his childhood. He'd taken the robot apart with a splinter from his crib-never mind that he'd been too old for a crib for the past year-in his desperate attempt to make the noise again. Every second there was silence was a second that something was wrong, something was broken.

"...monkey blowing a bubble! Of course, monkeys aren't reliable witnesses, but wouldn't it be madness if there were really aliens under Stonehenge? I'd never go investigating alone, but maybe when you come back..."

Tony never broke down. Usually machines were the only things with that kind of reliability. Jeff liked things that were reliable.

"...hope that you'll be home for your birthday, I promise it'll be ever so much more fun than mine, at least, if you're here. I know, you have other things on your mind, like saving the world, and there's no one better to do that than you. I had another of those dreams about us last night..."

A spark flew out of the receiver phone, smarting against Jeff's palm. He let out a startled hiss, snatched his hand back. "Tony? I have to go."

The silence was deep, almost horror-stricken. Fortunately, Tony never let the silence last long. "Right, of course, you're busy off saving the world. I'll let you go ahead and get back to that. I know you're busy."

The connection was severing quickly. "I'll call you when I can. It's Ness's phone-"

The wire melted. Jeff flicked it away. Tony would understand. He always did. More than Dr. Andonuts's lab, it was Tony's voice that made him feel at home, that he missed after being away, that he needed to take away the silence.

And if Tony ever broke down, well, Jeff would fix him.


End file.
